Google Disputes News That Search Engine Use Is Falling via @sejournal, @martinibuster

Google took the unusual step of issuing a response to news reports that AI search engines and chatbots were causing a decline in traditional search engine use, directly contradicting testimony given by an Apple executive in the ongoing U.S. government antitrust lawsuit against Google.

Apple Testimony That Triggered Stock Sell-Off

Google’s stock price took a steep dive on the news that people were turning away from traditional search engines, dropping by 7.51% on Wednesday. What triggered the stock sell-off was testimony by Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of services, who testified that search engine use by users of Apple’s Safari browser declined for the first time last month, expressing his opinion that a technological shift is underway that is undercutting the use of traditional search engines.

Early AI Adopters Turning Away From Google?

There is a view in Silicon Valley that Google Search is legacy technology. A recent episode of the Y Combinator show featured the host sharing that their Google search traffic has dropped by 15% and that he attributes that to AI use in both Google and chatbots. He explained that if you want to see the future you look to the early adopters, commenting that everyone he knows in Silicon Valley uses ChatGPT to get answers and that Google Search is defacto legacy technology.

The host described how 25 years ago the early adopters were using Google but that now, Google Search feels weird to him.

He said:

“People are now switching their behavior to where your default action if you’re looking for information is, you know ChatGPT or perplexity, or one of these things, and even just, you know, observing my own behavior. I’ll use Google mostly for kind of navigational. Like, if I’m just looking for a specific website and I know it’s going to give the same thing, but it’s starting to have that weird kind of, like legacy website, like I’m using eBay or something.”

Google’s Statement

Google’s statement was short and to the point, with no accompanying images to make it look like a blog post. Google’s statement could even be seen as terse.

Here’s what Google published:

“Here’s our statement on this morning’s press reports about Search traffic.

We continue to see overall query growth in Search. That includes an increase in total queries coming from Apple’s devices and platforms. More generally, as we enhance Search with new features, people are seeing that Google Search is more useful for more of their queries — and they’re accessing it for new things and in new ways, whether from browsers or the Google app, using their voice or Google Lens. We’re excited to continue this innovation and look forward to sharing more at Google I/O.”

AI Revolution: What Nobody Else Is Seeing

Here’s the video of the Y Combinator show that offers a peek at how people in Silicon Valley relate to Google Search. The part I quoted is at about the 24 minute mark.

Featured Image by Shutterstock/Framalicious

Apple May Add AI Search Engines to Safari As Google Use Drops via @sejournal, @MattGSouthern

Apple is reportedly planning to redesign Safari to focus on AI search engines.

According to recent testimony in the Google antitrust case, this comes as the company prepares for possible changes to its profitable Google deal.

Apple Signals Shift In Search Strategy

Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of services, testified that Safari searches dropped for the first time last month.

He believes users are choosing AI tools over regular search engines. This change happens as courts decide what to do after Google lost its antitrust case in August.

Per a report from Bloomberg, Cue testified:

“You may not need an iPhone 10 years from now as crazy as it sounds. The only way you truly have true competition is when you have technology shifts. Technology shifts create these opportunities. AI is a new technology shift, and it’s creating new opportunities for new entrants.”

AI Search Providers May Replace Traditional Search

Cue believes AI search providers such as OpenAI, Perplexity AI, and Anthropic will eventually replace traditional search engines like Google.

“We will add them to the list — they probably won’t be the default,” Cue said, noting Apple has already talked with Perplexity.

Currently, Apple offers ChatGPT as an option in Siri and plans to add Google’s Gemini later this year.

Cue admitted that these AI search tools need to improve their search indexes. However, he said their other features are “so much better that people will switch.”

“There’s enough money now, enough large players, that I don’t see how it doesn’t happen,” he said about the shift from standard search to AI-powered options.

Context: Google’s Antitrust Battle Timeline

This testimony comes during a key moment in the case against Google:

• August 2024: Judge Mehta ruled Google broke antitrust law through exclusive search deals
• October 2024: DOJ proposed remedies targeting search distribution, data usage, search results, and advertising
• December 2024: Google offered counter-proposals to loosen search deals
• March 2025: DOJ filed revised proposals, including possibly forcing Google to sell Chrome

The $20 Billion Question

The core issue is Google’s deal with Apple, worth a reported $20 billion per year, that makes Google the default search engine on Safari.

While expecting changes to this deal, Cue admitted he has “lost sleep over the possibility of losing the revenue share from their agreement.”

We learned about this payment during the trial. In 2022, Google paid Apple $20 billion to be Safari’s default search engine.

Last year, they expanded their partnership to add Google Lens to the Visual Intelligence feature on new iPhones.

Proposed Remedies & Responses

The DOJ’s latest filing suggests several significant changes:

• Making Google sell off Chrome
• Limiting Google’s payments for default search placement
• Stopping Google from favoring its products in search results
• Making Google’s advertising practices more transparent

Google has criticized these proposals, calling them a “radical interventionist agenda” that would “break a range of Google products.”

Instead, Google suggests letting browser companies deal with multiple search engines and giving device makers more freedom about which search options are preloaded.

What This Means

If Apple shifts Safari toward AI, prepare for significant changes in search.

It’s not a stretch to say the outcome could reshape search competition and digital marketing for years.

Featured Image: Bendix M/Shutterstock

Google’s Walled Garden: Users Make 10 Clicks Before Leaving via @sejournal, @MattGSouthern

New data shows Google keeps users on its site longer. Visitors now make 10 clicks on Google’s site before leaving for another website.

This finding comes from a 13-month study comparing Google and ChatGPT traffic patterns.

Google Keeps Users In, ChatGPT Sends Them Out

Tyler Einberger of Momentic analyzed Similarweb data showing that Google’s “pages per visit” metric has climbed to 10 as of March, a big jump from before.

Image Credit: Momentic.

What does this mean? Users spend more clicks on Google’s search results than on other websites.

The report explains:

“Increasing ‘Pages per Visit’ for Google.com is an indicator that users are spending more clicks within Google’s search results (SERPs). Since most SERP interactions—like interacting with SERP features, paging, refining searches, or clicking images—change the URL but keep visitors on Google’s domain.”

Google still sends the most overall traffic to external websites.

Google generated 175.5 million outgoing visits in March compared to ChatGPT’s 57.6 million. This represents a 66.4% increase for Google compared to last year.

The Efficiency Gap

ChatGPT is more efficient at sending people to other websites.

The numbers tell the story:

• ChatGPT generates 1.4 external website visits per user
• Google produces just 0.6 visits per user

This means ChatGPT users are 2.3 times more likely to visit external websites than Google users, even though Google’s audience is about 6.8 times larger.

The SERP Retention Strategy

Google’s increasing in-platform clicks match its strategy of expanding search features. These features provide immediate answers without requiring users to visit other websites.

Google is succeeding at two goals:

1. Remaining the web’s primary traffic source
2. Keeping users on Google’s properties longer

While Google sent more outgoing traffic in early 2025, its audience barely grew. This shows a complex relationship between keeping users and referring them elsewhere.

What This Means

For SEO pros and marketers, this trend creates new challenges and opportunities:

• With users spending more time on Google’s interfaces, capturing attention in the first screen view matters more than ever.
• Focus on appearing in featured snippets, knowledge panels, and other SERP elements to maintain visibility as traditional organic clicks become harder to get.
• Consider ChatGPT and other AI platforms as additional traffic sources since they refer more visitors per user.
• Users now interact with multiple SERP features before clicking a website, requiring better attribution models and content strategies.

The Broader AI Search Market

While Google and ChatGPT lead the conversation, other AI search platforms are growing fast.

Perplexity grew 110.7% month-over-month in March. Grok grew 48.1% and Claude grew 23%.

These newer platforms could change current traffic patterns as they gain users, though the report doesn’t analyze their referral efficiency in detail.

Google remains the biggest traffic source overall. However, its growing “walled garden” approach means marketers should watch these trends and diversify where their traffic comes from.

Featured Image: Here Now/Shutterstock

Google’s Updated Raters Guidelines Target Fake EEAT Content via @sejournal, @martinibuster

A major update to Google’s Search Quality Raters Guidelines (QRG) clarifies and expands on multiple forms of deception that Google wants its quality raters to identify. This change continues the trend of refining the guidelines so that quality raters become better at spotting increasingly granular forms of quality issues.

TL/DR

Authenticity should be the core principle for any SEO and content strategy.

Quality Guidelines Section 4.5.3

Section 4.5.3 has essentially been rewritten to be clearer and easier to understand but most importantly it has been expanded to cover more kinds of deception. One can speculate that the quality raters weren’t overlooking certain kinds of website deception and that these changes are addressing that shortcoming. This could also signal that Google’s algorithms may in the near future become more adept at spotting the described kinds of deception.

The change in the heading of section 4.5.3 reflects the scope of the changes, with greater detail over the original version.

The section title changed from this:

4.5.3 Deceptive Page Purpose and Deceptive MC Design

To this:

“4.5.3 Deceptive Page Purpose, Deceptive Information about the Website, Deceptive Design”

The entire section was lightly rewritten and reorganized for greater clarity. It’s not necessarily a new policy but rather a more detailed and nuanced version of it, with a few parts that are brand new.

Deceptive Purpose

The following is a new paragraph about deceptive purpose:

“Deceptive purpose:

● A webpage with deliberately inaccurate information to promote products in order to make money from clicks on monetized links. Examples include a product recommendation page on a website falsely impersonating a celebrity blog, or a product recommendation based on a false claim of personal, independent testing when no such testing was conducted.”

Google very likely has algorithmic signals and processes to detect and remove sites with these kinds of deceptive content. While one wouldn’t expect that a little faking would be enough to result in a sudden drop in rankings, why take the chance? It’s always the safest approach to focus on authenticity.

To be clear, the focus of this section isn’t just about putting fake information on a website but rather it’s about deceptive purpose. The opposite of a deceptive purpose is a purpose rooted in authenticity, with authentic intent.

Deceptive EEAT Content

There is now a brand new section that is about fake EEAT (Expertise, Experience, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) content on a website. A lot of SEOs talk about adding EEAT to their web pages but the fact is that EEAT is not something that one adds to a website. EEAT is a quality of a website that’s inherent in the overall experience of researching a site, learning about a site, and in the process of consuming the content, which can result in signals that site visitors may generate about a website.

Here’s the guidance about fake EEAT content:

“● A webpage or website with deceptive business information. For example, a website may claim to have a physical “brick and mortar” store but in fact only exists online. While there is nothing wrong with being an online business, claiming to have a physical “brick and mortar” (e.g. fake photo, fake physical store address) is deceptive.

● A webpage or website with “fake” owner or content creator profiles. For example, AI generated content with made up “author” profiles (AI generated images or deceptive creator descriptions) in order to make it appear that the content is written by people.

● Factually inaccurate and deceptive information about creator expertise. For example, an author or creator profile inaccurately claims to have credentials or expertise (e.g. the content creator claims falsely to be a medical professional) to make the content appear more trustworthy than it is.”

Deceptive Content, Buttons, And Links

The new quality raters guidelines also goes after sites that use deceptive practices to get users to take actions they didn’t intend to. This is an extreme level of deception that shouldn’t be a concern to any normal site.

The following are additions to the section about deceptive design:

“● Pages with deceptively designed buttons or links . For example, buttons or links on pop ups, interstitials or on the page are designed to look like they do one thing (such as close a pop up) but in fact have a different result which most people would not expect, e.g. download an app.

● Pages with a misleading title or a title that has nothing to do with the content on the page. People who come to the page expecting content related to the title will feel tricked or deceived.”

Takeaways

There are three  important takeaways from the updates to section 4.5.3 of Google’s Search Quality Raters Guidelines:

1. Expanded Definition Of Deceptive Purpose

• Section 4.5.3 now explicitly includes new examples of deceptive page intent, such as fake endorsements or falsified product testing.
• The revision emphasizes that deceptive purpose goes beyond misinformation—it includes misleading motivations behind the content.

2. Focus On Deceptive EEAT Content

• A new subsection addresses deceptive representations of EEAT, including:
• Fake business details (e.g. pretending to have a physical store).
• Made-up author profiles or AI-generated personas.
• False claims of creator expertise, such as unearned professional credentials.

3. Deceptive Design and UI Practices

The raters guidelines calls attention to manipulative interface elements, such as:

• Buttons that pretend to close popups but trigger downloads instead.
• Misleading page titles that don’t match the content.

Google’s January 2025 update to the Search Quality Raters Guidelines significantly expands how raters should identify deceptive web content. The update clarifies deceptive practices involving page purpose, false EEAT (Expertise, Experience, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) content, and misleading design elements. The purpose of the update is to help raters to better recognize manipulation that could mislead users or inflate rankings and could indicate the kinds of low quality that Google is focusing on.

Featured Image by Shutterstock/ArtFamily